Portage-utilsŁukasz DamentkoJoshua SaddlerMarcelo Góes
This guide covers some common uses of portage-utils, a set of fast Portage
helper applications written in C.
1.32007-05-23Introduction

portage-utils is a collection of very fast utilities written in C, which
are meant to offer a faster but more limited alternative to their
gentoolkit counterparts. Please note that portage-utils is not
meant to replace gentoolkit. Its utilities are much more efficient than
the equivalent ones from gentoolkit and might be better suited to be
used in scripts that need to call Portage repeatedly, but portage-utils
does not offer the same functionalities. It does not consider eclasses at all
and does not provide tools like revdep-rebuild and glsa-check.

More information about gentoolkit can be found in the Gentoolkit guide.

You can view the complete list of applications in portage-utils by typing
man q or q --help. Please read the man page for each utility
described, as this guide is only meant to be a short reference for the most
useful functions and does not include all the information about each
application.

Of course, all the files which were changed after installation will be reported
here. If the application reports configuration files which you have manually
edited after installation, there's nothing to worry about.

Listing packages which depend on some package

Of course there's also an application which allows you to list all the packages
which depend on some package. This is done using qdepends. Use the
-a flag to show all the DEPEND, RDEPEND, and PDEPEND information for a
package.

There is also a tool that allows you to extract useful information from your
emerge.log file. It's called qlop and it can be useful when
you want to estimate package compilation times or compare with your friends
whose computer compiles faster. It also allows you to check what's compiling at
the moment and how long it will take - which is handy when you're working in the
console and don't have any other means to check it.